


Despondent

by ilyiccia



Category: RWBY
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Blood, Drowning, Except it’s February, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, I Tried, Passing Out, Unexpected side effects of magic, Whump, Whumptober, and I’m not doing it in the right order, tags to be updated with each chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:13:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29195874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilyiccia/pseuds/ilyiccia
Summary: Alive has never meant impervious. Being a huntress always had extreme risks of harm and Ruby was no stranger to this.A series of prompt-based works in which Ruby has a bad time.
Kudos: 11





	1. Collapse

**Author's Note:**

> A series of drabbles based on random whumptober prompts from last year. 
> 
> Ruby-centric; although some of it is about her from other people’s point of view. The main warnings are in the tags but I’ll put a content warning at the start of each chapter too!

White erupts- beautiful, blinding- piercing the retinas and clogging the senses as it takes a relentless hold of the world. There is a short moment of awe amidst the panic but it is quickly suffocated and drowned out. Time loses meaning as the ground disappears from beneath them. Weightlessness presents in an illusion that confuses fear with bliss. The light splinters, then shatters and falls away, cracking the air and returning breath to lungs. Dust settles and the world pieces itself back in clumps and fragments as swarmed vision rearranges and returns. 

The battlefield reclaims its place in the peripheral but it now lacks the Grimm which had dominated it moments before. Gravity returns and the very blood in the veins seems to weigh a little heavier as senses slowly settle. 

Black, white and yellow cloud each other’s vision but there is one colour missing, the absence of which would otherwise be desired on a plain of war. But it is lacking here and the realisation is fickle like sand that slips through uncoordinated fingers as they each in turn grown weary of the lack of _red_. 

Yang turns first, spinning with a great force that beckons the others to follow. They turn and the look and they face the last piece of the mismatched puzzle that is their team; ready to congratulate, to gawk at, to scold for reckless bravery that they can never repay in lacking such a gift. 

They meet Ruby’s gaze as she stands before them. 

Relief is shattered in a moment as she smiles a broken grin, a wordless expression of exhaustion in a single half crescent moon of a smirk that does nothing to alter the truth. 

Ruby smiles and silver eyes flicker once, cracking almost, like lightning that splinters a tree and rips apart the very earth beneath it. They flicker then dull and like a moonless night they grow dark; before rolling back, away from the world. 

Glimpses of black, shards of white and small fleeting flickers of yellow swarm Ruby’s vision. The world dims, then goes dark and in the silence there is nothing.


	2. Isolation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cw: drowning

There is very little sound underwater. 

Only a gentle rush of liquid against the eardrums. The small pop of tiny bubbles that take with them any lasting oxygen. Adrenaline drowns all sense and in that moment she is weightless. 

No fear. No pain. No feelings. 

Just a slither of sunlight that shines through the water’s surface and slowly fades away as her eyes blur and vision shatters. 

There is no room for contemplation, only acceptance and a small pillar of grief that tugs at the back of her mind. But it is impossible to focus on in a vast void of nothingness where everything around her is too quiet but her brain is too loud with a deafening static. 

Then suddenly there is warmth spreading within her chest too fast, too hot. Burning and screaming as it rips apart her lungs and skin. 

The warmth is a fire that consumes the adrenaline and leaves only pain that bleeds into her bone- her very being- and mocks her, as her attempts to cry out bring only more liquid into her throat to suffocate.

There is pain but no fear. No anything, really. 

In the nothingness there is a bliss. And maybe that’s just the oxygen being cut off to her brain and numbing her senses and emotions in a mismatch of fading feelings like a patchwork quilt that is being ripped to shreds. 

She slowly succumbs to the void, feeling aura crack and splinter against swelling skin and any last remnants of oxygen being stripped from her lungs. 

Vaguely she is aware of a dark figure breaking through the sunlight and shimmering surface as it reaches toward her. Yet it’s so far away in an ocean that grabs and pulls and clings which such force as too never let go. 

Vaguely she is aware of someone coming to free her from the void. But in that moment Ruby is too tired to care as exhaustion wins the day.


	3. Bleed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cw: blood

There is blood on his hands. 

It’s warm and thick and stains the air with a thick metallic stench that pulls bile from her stomach. She swallows it back down. There is no time for her own useless fear. 

She needs Jaune. But Jaune isn’t here and he won’t be here for at least another five minutes and Ruby would have gone to him herself but her aura was long since drained and her semblance runs dry. 

Blake is the most agile and graceful of them and she’s not supposed to be the one on the ground. Not supposed to be the one bleeding out. 

But there was a scar on her waist from the sword of a man who’s name still brings a still to the air when uttered. And although healed, there was still a mark, still tender tissue that wasn’t quite as strong or smooth as the skin around it.

A weak spot. Her Achilles heal. 

It took three stray bullets to splinter Blake’s aura; two more to completely shatter it; and one single blow to the stomach from a Grimm twice her size to reopen the wound in her side that had existed only as a reminder of a past bathed in shadows. 

Emotions coming spilling out with blood from Blake’s side but Ruby cannot stand to let them distract her right now. 

Blake doesn’t say anything. Just lies still with silent eyed that stare into a great vast of nothingness. 

She’d been talking earlier, keeping Ruby calm and Ruby had hated that so much because she wasn’t the one suffering, she had no right to be spilling over like the ocean when the tide is too high and the moon commands the waves with such crashing force that they cannot be contained. 

Blake doesn’t say anything now. Ruby pressed her hands harder against the wound and utters a silence prayer for Jaune to arrive soon because the sun is already far set in the sky and the frozen landscape looks so ominous at night.

The sky grows red like the crimson staining her hands. The tide has come back in a wave of exhaustion but she ignores it. She’ll only ever sleep when she’s sure her friends are safe from the harshness of the world. 

She is the leader but she had let down her guard and now Blake bleeds out beneath her shaking hands. Ruby will sleep later when the world has no use for her, but for now she sits in the snow careful and steadfast and prays that the night will be forgiving.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading :D


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